 Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante, and I'm with Wikibon.org, and this is the Cube, SiliconAngle.tv's production, where we bring you the smartest people that we can find. We like to extract the signal from the noise and package it up and provide it to you. I'm at Dave Vellante, if you want to tweet me, at Stu is my co-host, and Stu's also with Wikibon, so if you have any questions or comments, please send them. We're here right now with another customer segment, we've been having a number of these customer segments at the Dell Storage Forum, a lot of good proof points. I'm impressed by the way that Dell is able to provide great customer guests and proof points. Donald Wilkins is the director of IT, a company called NaviCure out of Georgia. First of all, Donald, welcome to the Cube. Glad to be here. Thanks for taking time out, and this is actually your, I guess, first and a half Dell Storage Forum. The first one you said was in Dallas as an equilogic customer. This is the first full sort of, you know, belly to belly Dell Storage Forum that you've attended. What do you think? I'm impressed. A lot of good information, and a lot of good networking with some of these people that we've exchanged a lot of ideas, a lot of history of how we've grown with our infrastructure and how they've grown, it's been a good connection. You come to these events, and obviously the keynotes are good, you get good messaging and they're playing music, and it's very slick, but there's a, it seems to be a lot of rich breakout sessions, a lot of detail there. Have you been able to attend a number of those? I've dropped in on a few, and it's been very beneficial. I've taken away some pieces of information I didn't think about previously, and I've dealt with some of these technologies. We use VMware, we use a number of different options, and there's some things that I've learned. It's been a great experience so far. So tell us about NaviCure, what do you guys do? We're a healthcare claims clearinghouse. We handle healthcare claims from physicians as they transfer those to the insurance provider, the insurance payer. It's a strictly electronic form of data interchange. So we refer to it in the old days of EDI, and so we're after, we're all about making the doctor's reimbursement for his, for the insurance claims, a much better process. Okay, so I want to get into that in some detail, because you've got, you're very process driven, I'm sure, but before we do that, just tell us a little bit about your IT environment. First of all, your role as director of IT, I presume you're doing a lot of different things, but maybe talk about that, and then we'll get into sort of your environment. So I mean, my role at the company evolves every day. I mean, it's, I wear a lot of different hats, the mile wide, an inch deep methodology, so I know a little about a lot of stuff, and my whole goal in our infrastructure is keeping simple. And I don't want to introduce too much complexity in the environment because there's not enough really hands to dig deep into issues. I want to be able to make sure we can manage things in a simple manner. Our infrastructure has evolved through the years. We are a growing company, we grow 20 to 30% each year. Our customer base is continually growing, and each year that's just a magnitude, a multiplier every year as we keep growing the business. Our storage is ballooned, year after year after year we keep adding more storage, needing more performance, needing more capacity, and our choice for the Ecologic product has really proven itself over the years. How much storage do you have? We're currently just shot 400 terabytes of storage. We have currently 38 Ecologic arrays, which is the entire spectrum of their product line from the original flagship product shipping in their early 2000s, 2004 was our original purchase, to the current hybrid stuff that's shipping today. And how long have you been with? Eight years. Thank you. Okay, so you were there at the beginning when the company brought in Ecologic, you obviously involved in that decision to do so. Take us back to that point. What did the environment look like pre Ecologic? Pre Ecologic, we were a small organization, very small. We started the company with only four employees, I was part time at the time we started the company. We took three years of let's decide what we want to do with infrastructure. Let's outsource our storage to a third party provider in our data center, and let's see where the things goes. As we kept growing in business, growing in customers and we decided we need to end source our storage because we need more control over the flexibility we need to grow at the pace we needed. Having it outsourced really handcuffed our ability to grow, our ability to build development environments, to build test cases and do things and the outsource provider couldn't move fast enough for us. We need to move at a faster pace. You were outsourcing to a managed hosting company? It was a company that was in the co-location facility we were in that provided fiber channel storage for us. They basically carved out space for us and they managed it for us. In 2004 we got into a position we need to build more development environments, we need to have more space and so we looked at various product offerings, the larger names, the NetApps, the EMCs, and then we got introduced to an Ecologic and it's really turned our thought processes around when you can bring an array in, set it up on a conference table and turn it on and connect to it and use the GUI and really almost understand the product within 20 or 30 minutes of being introduced to it, which really gave us excitement around the product. We tried it for six months, we brought it in for development tests, we bought one for development tests, we liked it for six months, we decided to put it in production and we haven't looked back since. So you said you were employee number four, have I heard that correctly? Four and a half. Part time guy. At that point when you were evaluating the Ecologic, you were really responsible for that evaluation, right? For the last part, yes. Okay, so it was just kind of your call and that coincided with your VMware initiative? VMware didn't come along until a couple of years later. VMware came into the mix primarily for disaster recovery, looking at a way to one, grow our environment really fast, really quick and virtualization was the way to do it. We were at a turning point in the life cycle where we knew we had to add a lot of servers, a lot of functionality, a lot of different add-ons to our existing infrastructure. Again, when you're growing and you're starting small, you have very small footprint and we were starting to ramp up at a much faster pace. Virtualization allowed us to do that without the infrastructure of having all these servers racked up and having a deal of consolidation. Consolidation was not a problem for us because we didn't have infrastructure, but we knew we needed it years two, three, four, five, six later. So, okay, so the VMware came a little bit later. So I want you to take us back to that point at which you decided to go with this company from New Hampshire, right, that was a startup. You know, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, right? And so you stuck your neck out and said, yeah, nobody ever, by the way, nobody ever got fired for coming on theCUBE, so. Now, where'd they go? So, so. Can we get back to the office? Yeah, yeah, right. So you stuck your neck out and did that and, what was that like? I mean, you're taking some risks there. Well, I mean, we did take some risk, but I looked at it from, I really asked this question at the time, we were a startup ourselves. Our customers have took a risk on us and we've proven it wrong. And I knew that, you know, maybe I need to take a risk on this product because I looked at the other products and I knew, you know, three, four, five years down the road, I got a fork lift and start over. And this technology allows you to bolt on and build on and keep adding to it like bricks, like you're building a building and you're putting a brick in here and a brick in there. You can build it as you need to, you can grow as you need to. And having a cash flow as a constraint early on in the business that needed, that really had to watch its dollars, which everybody does today anyway, but we had to really focus on that and so it allowed us to invest as we made money, as we needed to, versus buying everything up front and paying for all that licensing fees, everything up front, and then having to sit on it for a year or two as we had to plan for three, four, five years down the road. We could actually plan in a smaller segment a year or two because two years is a long time in IT and especially in our business where we're going 23%, that's a magnitude growth that we had to deal with. New product offering, a database explosion, all this just would be totally different in two years. And we didn't feel like we wanted to rip out and replace our storage every day for three or four years. That's interesting. So you had a higher risk tolerance than maybe some other companies. You're a startup. Ecologic is a startup. Obviously you're focused on cash flow. That fit in nicely, particularly the perpetual licensing model that they have, which is I think very attractive. So you're not going to choke on maintenance the way you might with some other organizations. So there's that risk reward balance and so you took that chance and then works out and then Dell buys Ecologic. So what was your reaction to that and take us through sort of what's happened subsequent to that acquisition? Well, you know, I initially had a knee jerk reaction. Hey, you know, don't break my support. I love the guys in New Hampshire. They do a very good job. Make sure you keep that group intact because you know, that's one of the reasons we're still that customer today. We love the product. We love the sports team at Nashua. They were doing a very good job. And so we were impressed. Don't break that for me. Because I mean, you know, not having that great success with some of the servers, you know, support in the past, we wanted to keep that great performance that we're getting out of New Hampshire with the support staff. And that was my initial concern. Then you look back and you say, well, Dell had a better economy of scale. Dell had a better way of taking Ecologic to another level and by themselves, maybe they couldn't have done it. Maybe they could. But definitely Dell allows them to be able to do that. Yeah, so okay, so subsequent to that, your concerns were nullified because the support was maintained, improved. I think Dell listened to all our existing Ecologic customers and said, there's something here. There's a reason why every one of these customers saying, don't mess with my support. And I think Dell listened. Dell kept the team intact. Dell kept the research and development up in New Hampshire and the level two, level three guys are there. They listened to it and they kept it intact. And since then, you know, they constantly, you gotta evolve it. You know, they're bigger and bigger you get. You gotta make adjustments. And they've been able to do that, keeping the core tenants intact. So what do you make of the announcements this week? They talk about the conversion for structure. Pete Kors was up on stage and he showed the shrunken equal logic array. What does that mean to you? Is that something that you're gonna be interested in or? Well, the Blade Storage Array was, it has some interest. You know, we're a lot bigger than that now. So it may not apply to our environment. Definitely, I would see if I was a, you know, getting into storage or getting into server consolidation, especially with looking at blade systems, it would be almost a no-brainer. Has a lot of value for it. But, you know, we've got a large investment already in equal logic and a lot of bigger units that provided, you know, our infrastructure. So it probably doesn't apply to us unless there's a special case for it. But definitely a smaller business or maybe a mid-size that is starting to, you know, add to the infrastructure, adding more sand storage, yes. So what's your IT environment like? Are your budgets growing? Are they flat? Are they down? You know, our budget grows some. I mean, we're in a 23% growth cycle every year. 20 to 30% of our business grows. We, and so that means we have to, we have to adjust our budgets accordingly. You know, of course we want to do less with more or do more with less. And so, yeah, our budgets don't grow at the pace of our sales and our growth in the business, but we do leverage new technologies, you know, new consolidated efforts and de-dupe and other things that allow us to, you know, kind of slow the growth and, you know, keep things in a night, a simple manner. But our environment, we have an Oracle Database. An Oracle Database is central to our operating. That database is 18 terabytes and that database grows at two terabytes annually. Good, sorry. And so it is central and we all run down on the ecological story. Now, we upgrade that storage every year, two or three, and we move that older storage to other environments where it's more suited. But we take it, so as we buy new storage, we look at what's the best stuff out there? What's the most best performing stuff? Let's put in production. Let's move the production stuff down the line to other environments that may not need that fastest stuff, but they need more horsepower, more capacity. So we're constantly shifting stuff around. Ecologic allows us to do that. Most monolithic chassis-based storage systems don't. Are you virtualizing the applications that are running on your Oracle Database? Oracle itself is not virtualized. It's a large Oracle Rack Cluster. It's a little problematic to do that. But our web servers, our Java middleware, and a lot of other things we run are all virtualized. We have a virtualization first policy like a lot of companies do. If I don't virtualize it, I gotta have a good reason. And it's gotta be something that requires that. Is the reason because Oracle is not really that friendly toward you virtualizing it? They have an anti-virtualization policy. Oh, anti-VMware. Well, that too. Policy, yeah. Well, anti-virtualization, anything other than theirs. Other than OVM, right? Well, why didn't you go with OVM? Okay, I'm biting my tongue in cheek here, but go ahead, tell me why you didn't go with OVM. VMware has many more years of R&D and product offerings that nobody matches today. We use Cyre Recovery Manager in our disaster recovery planning and Cyre Recovery Manager allows us to script our DR plan and most everybody else doesn't provide that today. That is a cornerstone of some of our virtualization. That's one of the reasons we try to virtualize everything because as soon as I virtualize it, I've got a disaster recovery process already in place for it. Have you thought about virtualizing your Oracle apps or Oracle database and dam the torpedoes or is it just too risky from a support standpoint? Well, we have too much CPU to deal with virtualization. It doesn't bias anything. Yeah, okay, so there's not a business case for it. We've got eight-way boxes and three or four in a cluster and they're 45% used. There's not a lot of overhead that we really think virtualization would give us. Yeah, so it's really not worth it. That's interesting. So what's the, let me ask you this. What's on Dell's to-do list from a storage standpoint? I mean, obviously we're talking about the things they do very well. Clearly a very happy and loyal, equal logic customer. What would you like to see them do a better job of? You know, obfuscating the different product offerings under Dell and making everything kind of come together with this fluid architecture is a neat design and offering that they're doing and allowing me if I had to put in a compelling solution or I had to back up to the cloud or I've got to do other things in my organization, build my own private cloud or whatever I need to do, they're taking all that and combining all these, the best features of all these different products and putting it together and saying, you can do that and you don't have to be an equal logic customer. You don't have to be a compelling customer to take advantage of this. We're bringing it all together. And so seeing they're doing all that and they're not like some of the other companies that, so while you got to bolt this on, you got to bolt that on, you know, they're actually taking the intellectual property of every one of these products and putting it in the other product and putting it here and putting it there whereas you're saying it's not an extra license feature here, license feature is there. They're just doing a good job of bringing it all together and I like to see more of this happen. And you know, kind of every time I visit something I say, oh, I could be doing that or I could be doing this, giving me thought processes for the next few years as we look to try to, you know, slow down some of our growth and data and our growth and acquisitions for more storage but also give me other processes with the caching of the SSDs on the servers that was announced this morning and what they're working on for the next year. That's something we're looking at. We're looking at speeding our customers, speeding up the response time to our application so our customers can do more and less time. So you're excited about the vision? I am, I am. I'm pretty excited. Did you take a trip to New Hampshire this week? Yes, I did. Yeah, how was that? I actually took me eight years to get up there and I'm pretty happy I got there finally. Met some good people, some people that I spoke to years ago in support and shook their hand finally so that was great. Yeah, I think if they're not the biggest, they got to be one of the biggest Ecologic Slice Dell employers in New Hampshire. There's a lot of talent in this area, you know, East Coast, mini computer companies and you know, the old digital crew. I know many of the folks have ended up in Ecologic so there's a good talent pool there and you know, as somebody from New England we're very happy to see Dell maintain that presence in New Hampshire. My other question before we break here is how do you, Donald, back up all your data? We use, so anyway, I'm a cyber recovery manager. It's integral to our disaster recovery plan but we use a lot of snapshots of replication. So snapshots for quick recovery. We replicate to our other facility for multiple copies and you know, some kind of a short term recovery. You know, we do send a tape some stuff for archival type purposes. We are in a healthcare space so there are some time requirements for us to keep data for seven years. So we do keep data on tape but we primarily rely on a lot of snapshots and replication and so we've had that since day one of the product. You got me taped at the end of the day if you want a cheap way to deep-archive it. That's the way we do it. And we didn't implement tape until last year so we've been snapshots of replicas up until last year and it's said, well, we're tired of buying discs to put this on, let's put it on tape and stick it in the safe. Plus, you know, God forbid if you ever really have to get to it, it's the fastest way to get to it is to stick a bunch of tapes in the truck and drive it somewhere. So how about Appashore? Is that something that you're looking at? You know, we just made it, like I said, last year we just made an acquisition for tape software, probably not looking at it anytime immediate, maybe next year in a budget cycle. You know, what's key with Appashore is the integration they're doing with all the different products. That will make us look at Appashore. So you want to see that, like you were saying before and then that's going to just make it more and more attractive. That will be the piece that will make us really want to jump on that, say we've got full integration with Ecologic, we've got full integration with Confluent. Now we, and so, and plus it allows me to take a, like the analysis morning to take my physical box, if I have to have a physical, I can restore it to the cloud in a virtual environment with Appashore. That's cool. All right, Donald, well listen, thanks very much for coming in on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Really great meeting you. Outstanding case study, Dell. Listening to its customers, you know, we're seeing Dell really push the vision of integration. Customers like Donald want to see it faster. It's not trivial, but the fact that Dell is putting such an emphasis on this, to me anyway, is a real differentiator that I see in the marketplace from some of the other companies that we follow. So this is SiliconANGLE.tv's theCUBE. We're live from Dell Storage Form. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest from Boston. Thanks for watching.